whats the little slot on the left side of the Mac Book Pro

[fjs08]

Just picked up my Mac Book Pro (MBP) yesterday. Have a Powerbook (PB) so I'm not new to Macs. But whats the little slot on the left side of the Mac Book Pro?? I noticed there is no PCMCIA slot. I used to transfer my photos via an SD disk. Guess I'll have to either get a USB driven card reader or just plug the entire camera in. But whats the little slot on the left side of the Mac Book Pro???

I couldn't believe how easy it was to transfer literally everything from my PB to the MBP. Even put the items on my desktop in the exact same spot too!! WOW!!

Thanks.

Frank

 

[rdowns]

It's an ExpressCard/34 slot. A newer generation PCMCIA type slot. Not a whole lot of cards available.

 

[dmw007]

It is an ExpressCard/34 slot (essentially a PCI-Express based PCMCIA slot).



EDIT- Beat to the punch by rdowns.

 

[fjs08]

So what goes in there?? I've never seen any camera's that have cards small enough to fit in there.

Frank

 

[dextertangocci]

No, there aren't many cards that fit in their. But once they start appearing, you'll love the difference in speed (400Mbps vs 10Mbps I think).

I think elgato makes an eyetv that fits in there

 

[robbieduncan]

So what goes in there?? I've never seen any camera's that have cards small enough to fit in there.

Frank

The ExpressCard slot is considerably larger than any flash memory standard apart from Compact Flash. I have an ExpressCard adaptor that takes Memory Stick, SD, MMC, xD...

I think you are talking about something different, or have only ever seen cameras that use Compact Flash?

 

[atszyman]

No, there aren't many cards that fit in their. But once they start appearing, you'll love the difference in speed (400Mbps vs 10Mbps I think).

I think elgato makes an eyetv that fits in there

That all depends on the type of PC Card you are using. Currently there are two different protocols in use in the PC Card format. PCMCIA and CardBus. PCMCIA cards are 16-bit and really slow. CardBus is basically a dedicated 32-bit 33 MHz PCI slot with some minor signaling differences. This gives a theoretical thoughput of 132 MB/s or just over 1 Gb/s. Unfortunately you typically only see about half of that bandwidth as being useful.

ExpressCard is basically a PCI Express x1 connection or a USB 2.0. This gives two dedicated 2.5 Gb/s channels or a 480 Mb/s USB interface. One going to the card and one coming from the card. You will probably end up seeing about 2x the performance from an Express card than from a CardBus card once overhead and switching is taken into account.